Found gold! Tucked away in my friend’s copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was LucasArts’ magazine The Adventurer, issue #2 from 1991.
Featuring:
activity page with steps to draw a pirate,
interview with Ron Gilbert, David Fox, and Noah Falstein,
Sam & Max comic,
Star Wars stuff, etc.
Gotta love the days when companies made magazines for fans and gave you how-to-draw instructions. One more reason for Retronator Magazine being a thing.
Celeste wins best independent game, many pixel art games recognized
It was a great day for pixels yesterday at The Game Awards. The annual show that happens in December at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles is an alternative to the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards we’re used to watching at the Game Developers Conference. The Game Awards are formatted more alike the Oscars, with celebrities from gaming and outside announcing winners across numerous categories.
All 5 games nominated for Best Independent Game were pixel art(ish) and if that wasn’t enough, each of the games was a winner in another category as well. Celeste won Games for Impact award, Dead Cells was best action game, Into the Breach best strategy game, Lucas Pope won best art direction for Return of the Obra Dinn, and The Messenger was named Best Debut Indie. Celeste took home the crown jewel of Best Independent Game and was also nominated in the main Game of the Year category among AAA titles such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and God of War which won in the end.
(Celeste team with pixel artists Pedro Medeiros and Noel Berry, second and fourth from the left.)
The timing of the show gives a nice opportunity for new game announcements during the break from August’s Gamescom and March’s Game Developers Conference, so we saw a lot of world premieres, a couple of them featuring pixel art.
The creators of the series Stranger Things announced a new title to coincide with Season 3 of the show, this time moving to bigger characters presented in isometric projection.
Even more spectacular was the cinematic for Survived By, a bullet hell rougelite which just got available on Early Access on Steam (free to play).
It was nice to see so much pixel art represented at the awards, sending a clear message that even as technology moves forward, this is an art style inherent to video games and it will always be part of our vocabulary.
Kingdom Two Crowns is almost upon us! Working towards its December 11 release, (un)publisher Raw Fury just released the launch trailer that shows many new goodies added to the Kingdom series.
I named Kingdom my favorite game of the year for both 2015 (Classic) and 2016 (New Lands) and I wrote extensively about its development in my Retronator Magazine article The fall and rise of Kingdom. It’s a finely designed strategy game with perfect, minimalistic controls and incredible atmosphere featuring a never-ending river to supply eye candy on every step of the way.
Two Crowns brings co-op multiplayer (online and split-screen) amongst many other gameplay additions (iron resource, new units, new mounts …). The campaign will bring us to feudal Japan at first, with new biomes following over time as the game gets expanded post-launch.
You can wishlist the game on Steam or wait for it to release on Switch, PS4, and Xbox One as well. Less than a week left!
Hey, long time no see! In today’s return to Retronator news broadcasting, let’s take a look at three pixel art Kickstarters you might want to dip your fingers into.
Hazelnut Bastille
If you’re into SNES action RPGs, here’s something that should bring warm memories of Zelda: A Link to the Past as soon as you see the iconic top-down graphical projection in the screenshots. Hazelnut Bastille stays close to the formula, with special attention given to level design, tactful combat, and shaping gameplay through obtaining items.
The great thing about Kickstarter these days is that games most often come with demos so you can get your hands on some free, fresh gameplay and easily decide if a project is for you. So is the case with Hazelnut Bastille. The Kickstarter campaign is already funded and far into its stretch goals, so hurry up if you want to get yourself a future copy ($15+, Windows/Mac/Linux/Switch).
Lore Finder
Lore Finder comes from one of my favorite developers to follow, Emma ‘Eniko’ Maassen, who’s not afraid to say how things are in indie game development. After her solo project Midboss, she formed a bigger team to create Lore Finder, including Wayne Kubiak behind the pixel art.
The game itself is a fairly standard platformer/metroidvania with obtaining items to progress through previously unaccessible areas, except the world itself also changes as your powers grow. You can play the demo right in your browser (awesome!) for a doze of Lovecraftian horror and not-too-difficult monster eradication. I’m looking forward to see how the self-described queer reimagining of the genre will play out with its agender protagonist further into the story.
Lore Finder is just about to reach its funding goal. You can help make it a reality as well on its campaign page ($10+, Browser/Windows).
Fabled Four
Just a quick mention of the new comic from writer Jamie Me (his 9th Kickstarter project) since this time it’s full of pixels. The art is drawn by scene regular Luke ‘Sadface’ Summerscales, known for his tutorials on Patreon and YouTube.
The first issue of Fabled Four is all finished, so backing it is a sure deal and will help continue the story going forward. Head over to Kickstarter for a few sample pages of role-playing fantasy action and an even bigger amount of British humor ($4+ PDF, $15+ physical).
Before the game lets you work on any pixel art quests, you have to show you can handle basic pixel art tools (pencil, eraser, color fill …). To do this you get an existing game sprite (you’ll be able to choose from close to 30 indie games) and you have to recreate the image, either with the in-game editor, or by uploading a file created with software of your choice.
To read more about the game, check out the devblog.
I had a lot of time on a 6h train ride so I manually rendered this lighting study without any references. First time doing animation in Pixaki, entirely drawn on an iPad.
If you ever say to yourself, “I’m just going to quickly whip out these three landscapes,” you’re lying to yourself. 48×36 canvases, still took hours to draw. This is another practice of doing custom colors. Left to right: warm only, cold only, monochrome (single hue).
Hello everyone, I am Matej Jan a.k.a. Retro. Welcome to Retronator—my blog and game development studio.
I started Retronator in 2007 with the goal of making video games focused on
creativity. Along the way I started writing about art and gaming, featuring artists and projects that
caught my attention. Nowadays this mostly includes pixel art, with occasional diversions into voxels,
low-poly 3D, low-res digital painting, and basically anything that makes me feel like a kid again
(text adventures, chiptune, LEGO …).
I'm also very nostalgic about 20th century games that didn't neglect their educational potential.
I expected titles like Sim Ant, Caesar II, and Sim City to continue into the future, expanding their
power to teach us something along the way. Games such as Kerbal Space Program and ECO continue to carry
the torch, but are far in between in the current gaming landscape. Expect Retronator to cover more
games like that in the future.
Finally, on these pages I document my own journey as an illustrator and game developer. I'm working
on an adventure game for learning how to draw called Pixel Art Academy. This newspaper lives
in the game world and I'll make that quite obvious soon. Thanks to backers of the game and supporters
on Patreon I can create this content full-time. Thank you for making this possible!
It's been 10 years since I started this journey and there is no doubt the next 10 will be
absolutely amazing. Stick around and I hope you will enjoy the ride.
Happy pixeling, —Retro
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